Felicitating Best Brands of Innovation & Sustainability

The 2nd edition of the Smart Green Summit & Awards in Mumbai, by The Economic Times & Saint-Gobain, fast forwarded the mandate of creating tomorrow’s sustainable living spaces. The event saw discussions, panels, exhibitions among key stakeholders, leaders and bureaucrats in the industry.

Ken Yeang

James Law

Ajay Pandey

Today, sustainability focuses not only on the growing need of eco-friendly built environments, but also on intelligently using and re-using the resources available. The key speaker at the event Ken Yeang, Senior Principal and Founder, T.R. Hamzah & Yeang Sdn Bhd added “I see great design as the integration of eco-structure; this involves nature, humans, water and the built environment. And so great design involves all of this. We have no time to lose. What becomes of nature and everything organic? We need to see how we can emulate nature and bring it into our built environment so that we can give back to nature what we have taken from it.”

The Smart Green Summit and Awards 2016 plunged deep into how sustainable practices worldwide is being integrated through innovating & evolving conventional practices and defining the path forward towards achieving world class status in environmental sustainability. James Law, Chairman & CEO & Chief Cybertect, James Law Cybertecture further elaborated “We must bear in mind that as people come together to live, we need to create better cities. Through eons, we have always had a fight between the built and the natural. This dichotomy exists even today, and we have to bring a flavor of this to the lives of those living in our new-born cities.”

Technology is here to help us, provided we are willing to use it for citizens’ advantage. Governance plays a key role in this, and none of the pieces of a smart city can work in isolation. Ajay Pandey, Managing Director & Group CEO, GIFT City quoted “The key to success lies in creating an integrated solution to the citizen. What is important is urban governance, even more so than the bells and whistles of technology. Enabling governing provisions can ease the common citizens’ life.”

Dia Mirza, present in the event shared a very unique perspective on sustainability, adding “India has the second largest population on the planet that is fighting for space on 7% of the land on this planet. And in that 7%, we need to find a way to exist with our forests, the species that keep these forests alive. We must learn to co-exist with this biodiversity, because all of our progress will be pointless if we don’t have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink in the next 20 years”.

Thomas-L-Vajda

R Subramanian

Being sustainable can be accelerated by good use of Smart technology. R Subramanian, Managing Director, Glass and Solutions in India-Glass Business, Saint-Gobain shared his views over the summit, adding “Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come. Sustainability is that idea, and the Smart Green Summit is the way through which we reaffirm our commit to greater sustainability.

Deepak Lamba, President, Times Strategy Solutions Ltd. shared his point of view on going green & following the sustainable pathway into the future. He added, “India is a world leader in frugal innovation which can easily spark eco-friendly and sustainable solutions. Optimism is the key and it is essential to strike a balance between human development and environmental sustainability. We at TSSL believe in creating knowledge platforms and solutions which are impactful in the industry. This year at Smart Green Summit, we saw leaders coming together to create conversations around the issues which we currently face and we endeavor to take it a notch higher in the coming years.”